On Theodorakis
by Gail Holst-Warhaft
Gail Holst with Mikis Theodorakis |
In
1979 I published a book about Mikis Theodorakis in which I said
it might seem strange to compare Theodorakis with the great
classical composers of Western music.
I
said then that he was a major contemporary composer whose work
deserved to be compared with that of Bartók and Stravinsky,
Britten and Boulez.
I
was criticized by some scholars who thought a man who had composed
a single symphony and was best known for his popular songs and
film scores could not be mentioned in the same breath as the
towering figures of classical music. |
Last May I was fortunate enough to accompany Theodorakis on a tour
of Europe where he presented his two recent operas, Electra
and Medea in the opera houses of Luxembourg and Meiningen.
I realized that opera was a musical form in which the extraordinary
gifts of this composer might be perfectly expressed. Theodorakis has
always been a song writer of genius. His settings of the leading Greek
poets -- Seferis, Ritsos, Elytis, Kambanellis, Eleftheriou -- have
been among his most memorable achievements, partly because of their
sensitive relationship to the texts, but mostly because of the composer's
unique and mysterious gift of melody.
Composition
is a difficult art, but most of its elements can be learned. Orchestration,
harmony, form, are all things that a diligent student can be taught,
but the ability to write melodies that will be remembered a hundred
years from now seems to be a gift one is born with. If there is one
composer of our times who has that gift, it is Mikis Theodorakis.
From his earliest popular songs, through the marvellous flourishing
of his great song cycles in the 1960's, the most striking feature
of his music is always the melody. Think of the "Song of Songs"
from Mauthausen, "Denial" from Epifania,
"Pandermi" or "The Wind and the Beauty" from Romancero
Gitan, "Open the Window a Little" from The
Hostage...
I could fill this page with the titles of his memorable melodies,
but there is another element that is almost as elusive as melody and
one that is also a difficult art to learn. Theodorakis shares with
Stravinsky and with Leonard Bernstein: a superb sense of rhythm. In
many of his popular songs he avoids rhythmic complexity, allowing
his melodies to dominate an otherwise simple arrangement or using
one of the dance meters familiar to Greek audiences. But when Theodorakis
decides to write a score in which subtle and complex meters play an
integral part in the music, he does so with superb skill. I am thinking
particularly of his setting of Pablo Neruda's Canto General
and the related material in the film score for Costa-Gavras' State
of Siege.
Theodorakis
has always composed in a variety of styles and genres, but Greek poetry
and the human voice have always been the principal source of his inspiration.
In the large symphonic works of the 1980's, and in the new arrangement
of his Zorba film score as a ballet, he returns to
the human voice as a major element in his composition, using large
choirs and soloists in combination with the full resources of the
orchestra. It was after the successful premiere of his Zorba
ballet at Verona, in 1988, that the composer decided to turn to opera.
He told me that he was inspired and honoured to see his name hanging
on a banner near the famous Roman theatre of Verona beside those of
Verdi, Puccini, and Bellini.
Almost
as a joke he told the director of the theatre that he would now begin
to compose operas. Not just one but three: one for Verdi, one for
Puccini and one for Bellini. It was a logical step for a composer
of his gifts, but one that had taken him many years to arrive at and
would take him more years of hard work to complete.
For
his libretto's, Theodorakis turned to classical Greek tragedy, translating
Euripides' Medea into modern Greek and composing
a score that originally lasted for five hours. His second opera was
based on Sophocles' Electra. He is presently working
on the Antigone.
From
his earliest days as a composer, Theodorakis was attracted to tragedy.
Working first with the Royal Ballet of Covent Garden, and later with
the film-maker Michael Cacoyannis and various Greek theatre companies,
he produced some powerful scores for ancient Greek drama, including
the music for the film Electra, one of the most effective
film scores I know. His operas have allowed him to combine his great
talents as a vocal composer with his strong sense of drama to produce
operas that will become, I am convinced, part of the repertoire of
European classical opera for many years to come. We are reminded,
listening to them, that ancient drama was always a musical art. The
choruses of Sophocles and Euripides were intended to be sung, not
spoken, and even the dialogue must have sounded more like the recitative
of an eighteenth century opera than the flat exchange of words we
hear in modern productions. It is to opera rather than regular drama
that we should look if we wish to recreate something close to ancient
tragedy. And if modern Greek has diverged from ancient Greek, it is
still the only living language we have that is close enough to ancient
Greek to allow us to have some flavour of the language of fifth century
B.C. Athens.
Listening to the young Greek mezzo-soprano Eva Revides in the title
role at the premiere of Electra I felt that here
was a musical drama that combined the richness of modern and ancient
Greece, a gift from a composer who at 70 years of age, never ceases
to astonish me with the abundance of his talent and the energy of
his creativity.
It
is sometimes difficult to realize the extraordinary nature of the
familiar. In Greece Theodorakis is often taken for granted as a composer,
or simply lumped together with the outstanding song-writers of his
day -- Hadzidakis, Loizos, Markopoulos, Savvopoulos. This is to highlight
only one dimension of the composer's work, his popular songs, and
even there, he towers above his contemporaries. When you consider
his achievements as a classical composer he becomes a musical colossus.
But even beyond that, he is a figure of international renown, a man
who symbolized resistance to the military dictatorship of 1967-74,
and who has, whether you are always in agreement with his political
position or not, devoted his whole life to his beliefs, to his ideal
of what modern Greece should be. Can any man claim to have done more
than that in one lifetime?
© Gail Holst-Warhaft, 1996
Gail
Holst-Warhaft is a writer, musician and translator. She played with
Theodorakis in Greece in 1975 and 1978. Her books include Road to
Rembetika, Theodorakis: Myth and Politics in Greek Music, and Dangerous
Voices: Women's Laments and Greek Literature. Her books have been
translated into Greek, German and Turkish. She has translated a number
of poems and prose works from Greek to English, including Mauthausen,
by Iakovos Kambanellis. She is a professor of Comparative Literature
and Classics at Cornell University.
Biography
(E) | Chronology (E)
| Catalogue of Works (E) | Index (E)